Happy New Year! We hope you had a restful and blissful holiday season and New Years day.As we enter 2019, we asked some of the most influential and thoughtful members of the GCR community to share their outlook on the Asia cryptocurrency and blockchain trends for this coming year. What will happen to the crypto markets in Japan, Korea and China? Where will the breakout opportunities and regions be? What should we in the west pay attention to?Given what we’ve seen in the industry thus far, here’s a collection of what some of them expect in 2019.
Alex Pack, co-founder and managing partner of Dragonfly Capital
Usage: The most natural early users of cryptoassets have always been in Asia, where the discrepancy between widespread smartphone penetration and low financialization of the economy makes it ripe for adoption of crypto’s financial applications. In 2019, as we move through the infrastructure and into the application phase, crypto businesses and infrastructure projects will be forced to look to Asia for their go-to-market strategies, to work with the large Asian distribution channels, and build for Asian users.
Exchanges as Distribution Channels: The largest crypto businesses in the world are already in Asia - of the top 20 exchanges by volume no more than a handful are based outside of Asia, as are the largest mining companies. In 2019, we will start to see these exchanges and mining companies act as distribution channels, offering new financial products and smart contract-based applications to their users.
Regulation: today the U.S. is still the most important center for crypto technology and product development in the world, but the uncertain regulatory climate could change that. The U.S. is in danger of losing its tech giant crown to more flexible Asian countries and the clock is ticking. If the regulatory situation in the U.S. doesn’t dramatically improve within 1-2 years, we could see Asian cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beijing becoming the new global hubs of crypto technology.
Benny Giang, co-founder of Cryptokitties
Korean market will have consolidation amongst technology and crypto businesses next year. There will be a huge effort amongst some of the top gaming companies to break into this space. What this means as a whole, is that Korea will be leading the way for consumer adoption in the earlier part next year. Lots of questions will be raised such as decentralized systems being slow vs semi-centralized systems with mass adoption.
Japan’s largest tech companies have secretive R&D teams. From my perspective, I don’t think a lot of the efforts will translate into new business lines in 2019. However, there is a handful of experienced veteran game producers who have formed their own blockchain gaming studios. A lot of high-quality blockchain games will be released in Japan late Spring to Summer of next year. This will set a new standard for a hybrid on chain/off chain blockchain games.
Lots of things are happening in China but we’ve started to focus more attention into Japan and Korea. There’s a high percentage chance of a better blockchain gaming ecosystem forming within those countries at least for 2019-2020. Until regulations are more clear from China. Good signs is the gaming license freeze is over!
Zac Cheah, founder and CEO of Pundi X
Blockchain will dominate the realms of emerging tech in 2019. We will see more and more traditional companies adopting blockchain technologies. Industries that are seeing an increased adoption of Blockchain are banking, financial services, insurance, supply chain management, healthcare, e-commerce, gaming and academics.
Government bodies have also started implementing blockchain. A number of initiatives have been taken across jurisdictions both at federal and state/provincial levels to implement blockchain to improvise on services and transform inter-governmental and citizen transactions. Areas like titles transfer, taxation, and identification have gained traction for blockchain in the Government sector.
Jehan Chu, co-founder and managing partner of Kenetic Capital
Asia will lead the way for blockchain adoption globally as large internet companies and conglomerates roll out production applications across supply chain, finance and yes, even (private) cryptocurrency. Korean gaming will demonstrate some of the first large-scale user adoption of crypto, while China will show more blockchain application layers inside of centralized enterprise structures.
Finally, Asia will lead regulatory the pack with progressive structures coming out of Singapore, Hong Kong and possibly Japan. While the US will see isolated wins like a possible Facebook cryptocurrency, they will likely fall behind as 2019 sees Asia putting applications into production en mass.
Jason Fang, managing partner at Sora Ventures
I think most of the hottest deals you see in the US will continue to stall, basically tell the same story until their team falls apart or they run out of mon

XRP’s capture of 2nd spot from Ethereum is soon going to be the longest reign as it trades at $0.3462, 90% down from its all-time high (ATH). Meanwhile, a number of exchanges are adding support for XRP.
XRP Ruling the 2nd Spot
XRP is in red in tandem with Bitcoin and the majority of the crypto market. Current, at $0.3462, it is registering losses of 7.69 percent in the USD market. In the BTC market, it is in the red by 0.59 percent. XRP is 90 percent down from its peak at $3.84.
XRP 1-year price chart, Source: Coinmarketcap
Despite being in the red market, XRP captured the 2nd place from Ethereum on November 15. Now, it’s been 13 days since XRP has been second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at about $14 billion.
It’s soon going to be the longest time XRP has been at this spot. Last time, this title was 14 days long in January end. Also, XRP dominance is surging, reaching close to 13 percent a few days back.
However, ETH records more daily trading volume at over $2.2 billion in comparison to XRP which is about $800 million as per Coinmarketcap.
Source: Coinmarketcap
Exchange Support
For the last few weeks, XRP has been getting constant support from exchanges, wallets, and platforms. LocalCoin is one such exchange that announced,
“New Listing! We are thrilled to announce @Ripple $XRP is now available on #LocalCoinSwap as an official trading pair! This makes us the only platform online where #Ripple can be exchanged P2P!”
Another addition is by eFIN, a decentralized trading platform which is powered by TokenPay and developed by BlocksizeDevs that will include XRP when it launches on December 19th. It “features a proprietary liquidity system that means it will be the FIRST decentralized trading platform to actually have volume.” It would also reportedly solve custody problem with user controlled wallets and the privacy problem with Tor.
Furthermore, DX exchange will be adding five main coins viz. Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. Additionally, Vertpig, a platform that allows buy, sell, and swap of cryptos is adding XRP in the coming days. It is also integrating EUR and GBP to trade these cryptos.
The post XRP Retains the Second Spot In Crypto Amid Continuous Exchanges’ Support appeared first on Coingape.

Recently, Twitter witnessed a feud involving the lead developer of Monero, Riccardo Spagni, who goes by the name Fluffy Pony on Twitter, and TokenPay, a cryptocurrency payment platform. According to the posts, Riccardo was invited for an open debate by TokenPay to address the allegations made by him which stated that TokenPay was a centralized platform ...

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